Follow Up – Australian Idol
Australian Idol – Channel 10 – 6:30pm Sunday – AUS
Idol is back, and after four seasons so am I. I haven’t watched a series since Casey Donovan won a ticket to obscurity. For so long my default position was that if Kyle Sandilands was a judge on Australian Idol then I wasn’t going to watch it, with news that after episode three Kyle will be booted from the series I can finally jump back on board.
The ads leading up to last night’s season opener bragged about how everything was going to be in ‘one big show’. There would be no separate results show, and the auditions would be cut down to only two weeks. Finally Idol was trimming the fat… But of course they wouldn’t. This is Idol. It’s all about the fat. Delta Goodrem & Brian McFadden have been added as guest judges for the auditions because figuring out whether somebody is a good singer or not is now a four person job.
The auditions are notoriously the worst part of any Idol season. If you took the ads and all the COMING UP previews out of last night’s two plus hours of Idol you’d be left with roughly thirty minutes of footage.
I’m used to a whole lot of nothing though; you see I’m a big fan of American Idol. But there’s just something about Simon, Randy and our recently departed Paula that makes sitting through eighteen hours of audition footage we’ve seen a thousand times before almost worthwhile. Aussie Idol on the other hand is an unlikeable waste of time. Marcia’s boring ‘thank you for coming in’ doesn’t even come close to Paula’s crazy ass love of every beautiful sole.
Even Dicko was a disappointment; I think I would have preferred Randy muttering about how it was ‘pitchy, dawg’. The biggest prick in the room wasn’t even Kyle; it was Brian McFadden who talks a lot of shit for a guy who was in Westlife. The only bright spot on the panel was actually Kyle. It pains me to write that because for so long I’ve hated the giant walking ego that is Kyle Sandilands, but wouldn’t you know it – I’m a hypocrite. And for the first time I’m actually worried about what the judging panel will look like come semi finals time if Kylie isn’t there.
Last night’s episode went on for so long that half way through I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t watching a crappy audition episode of Australian Idol. During the Titanic length episode we got to meet a bunch of contestants:
An annoying 16 year old ADD suffering Wookie named Aliqua. A zombie Ronald McDonald named Moire. A bricky named Scott who’d never sung in front of anyone before. A school teacher who’d never sung in front of anyone before. A nice guy who’d never sung in front of anyone but his church before. You know the score, you’ve been here before, there was a girl with a dying mum, a really nice dad with a little kid, there was a single mum, this is Idol you got the same contestants as you get every year.
We even got some ringers that included an ex-boy band member and a girl who’d made the semi finals in a previous season. Um, can they do that? “Oh and here’s Rob Mills ready to give it another crack.”
Was this audition episode a complete waste of time? Of course it was. The auditions are NEVER the worthwhile bit of an Idol series. Through the seemingly never ending parade of not that great but maybe okay singers we had to see get put through to the finals there was only one standout for me. Kate Cook: the lesbian abattoir worker from country Queensland who rides a Harley. She was the one who sang a song she wrote for her mum who had committed suicide when Kate was just 16 and she was freaking ace. Let’s hope Kate survives the boring padded out exercise in nothingness that is the Top 100, because Lord knows I’m not sitting through another Idol episode until the semi finals.
Seacrest out.
